


How it Feels to Feel

by lovelornity



Category: Sherlock (TV)
Genre: Character Study, Gen, One Shot, Post Reichenbach
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-01-02
Updated: 2013-01-02
Packaged: 2017-11-23 08:44:58
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 442
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/620239
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/lovelornity/pseuds/lovelornity
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Sherlock makes a terrible discovery: he has opened up to emotions. But at what cost?</p><p>What started out as me writing a letter to Sherlock turned into a second-person ficlet, a sort of reaction piece to the events of "The Reichenbach Fall."</p>
            </blockquote>





	How it Feels to Feel

Your heart aches. It’s a heaviness that weighs down your entire body.

Who you are and what you can do is everything you have, and now that’s gone, too. Just like you.

You will triumph in the end, but for now _he_ wins. Not even the fall he promised you can wipe the smile off his cold, dead face. 

And so you bide your time. Enlisting the help of your brother, perhaps. Waiting to reclaim your life. To claim your victory.

But is it victory you’re after? You have recovered the obscurity you once enjoyed. Would you trade it for celebrity? To once again be known to the stupidly mundane masses who worship the exceptional so that they can believe in something larger than their pathetic little lives? No. You don’t miss that.

But you do miss him. You always called him ordinary, but the truth is, you were constantly mystified by him. After a lifetime of predictability, you don’t know what to do with a man who continually surprises you. With his warmth, with his admiration, with his temper, with his loyalty. When you look at him you see his whole life, but then he surprises you by murdering a man in your defence just days after you’ve met. By rows with chip and pin machines. By sticking by you even when you’re at your worst. By caring for you even though you don’t understand why. By being your friend and not judging you when you don’t know quite how to return the favour. By enduring countless dangers and all manners of madness with a sarcasm and a smile that tells you he’d rather be there with you than anywhere else in the world.

Your world has grown much smaller. You could go anywhere, but you can’t leave him. And so you follow him to therapy, to the cemetery. You watch him try to understand, try to piece together what his ordinary mind won’t let him see. And then he surprises you again. He calls you a great man, a human being, and despite all your efforts to the contrary, he believes in you. Still. Extraordinary ordinary John Watson.

You watch him weep for you, and you want to call out to him, but you don’t. You feel unworthy of the grief that he conveys. And so you add his to your own heavy heart, and you mourn the loss of yourself and the loss of your friend. And you bide your time, searching for a solution to the final problem, that last puzzle that stands between you and him.

So this is how it feels to feel.

\- 16 JANUARY 2012


End file.
